


Under the Hide of Me

by sparklyslug



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Chance Meetings, F/M, Future Fic, M/M, the answer to every love triangle is a threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-23 01:51:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11979582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparklyslug/pseuds/sparklyslug
Summary: It’s her. Gleb doesn’t waste time doubting it. He’s spent five years catching glimpses of her in the upturned angle of a chin, blue eyes laughing or flashing in anger, a flick of auburn hair sent over a shoulder, a hand brushing against his in a crowded tram. Each time, every time, the illusion lasts only for an instant, and the woman before him is a stranger again. Every time, he feels the lack of Anya, of Anastasia, as an absence felt against the inside of his ribs. As fresh as though it was new.But this woman is not Anya as he remembers her. This isn’t a trick of the light, or a weakness of his mind, or his discomfort and yearning made manifest. She looks nothing like the grand duchess he fled from, the fairy tale that he buried. And that is how he knows she is real.Her Royal Highness has odd and unexpected tastes in nightclubs.





	Under the Hide of Me

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my wonderful beta defcontwo, for her help and support with this and every one of my wild obsessions. Ur my fave, babe.

_Night and day, you are the one_  
_Only you beneath the moon, under the sun_  
_Whether near to me or far_  
_It's no matter darlin', where you are_  
_I think of you, night and day_

 _Day and night, why's it so_  
_That this longing for you, follows wherever I go_  
_In the roaring traffic's boom_  
_In the silence of my lonely room_  
_I think of you, night and day_

 _Night and day, under the hide of me_  
_There's an ooh, such a hungry yearning, burning inside of me_  
 _And this torment won't be through_  
 _Till you let me spend my life making love to you_  
 _Day and night, night and day_

_(Cole Porter, "Night and Day," 1932)_

 

While around the world nations shrink and pinch, London in 1932 is bursting at its seams. The Great War is still in living memory for most, all the jazz and fringe can't banish the wave of hunger and want gripping the globe, and you can read in the air the promise of an heir to the War to End All Wars, perhaps not so far in the future. But London dances on, and refuses to acknowledge any such harm or fear.

The city bustles with twice the life that it should, in loud defiance of headlines and good sense. London is pushing out everywhere, eating up every bit of green for miles around with a hunger that even the first flush of industrialization wasn’t bold enough to put teeth to. The city climbs higher and higher into the sky, to such heights and at such a pace that it makes the jaw drop.

The jaws of Londoners, anyway. Gleb has seen higher buildings rise quickly and fall even faster. He’s strolled through empty palaces and been the first to open the door onto shining new government buildings, slipped through Paris opera houses and the chic apartments of a decadent falling class. He knows exactly the value of a grand building, and how little it ultimately means. So no, he doesn’t spend much time marvelling at these ugly steel-and-concrete structures.

But he’s not in London to admire the architecture.

Presently he’s not admiring much of anything. Gleb is busy feeling rather stupid and a little sorry for himself.  _You must come out, Gleb_ , Markov had said,  _you must see the people of this city, speak to them yourself. You can’t be always speaking only Russian to other Russians and meeting in the most bleak and depressing corners of this bleak and depressing city._

So Markov had dragged Gleb out to a dance hall a short walk from their carefully-nondescript offices, the kind of nightclub frequented by working people who had a few extra coins at the end of the shift, and no one in a uniform to snatch it from their hands. The kind of nightclub frequented mostly by the young, looking for a way to share a moment or steal some privacy away from their family homes, or the apartments they share with five other people. The kind of nightclub where even the tired can find some energy, if the music is good and the beer is cold.

Gleb barely had time to observe all this and to order his first drink before Markov had vanished into the arms of a smiling London girl. Moments later Gleb caught a glimpse of him waving cheerfully across the room, halfway out the door with the lovely blonde.

Markov is ten years older than Gleb and yet moves Gleb to angry lectures more than the greenest young men in their network. Their job here is a serious one, the current friendship between the British and the Russian governments extending only so far in this fragile post-war world. Certainly not far enough for the British to be overjoyed, should they discover Gleb’s network of listeners and watchers, scattered throughout this city. They all feel the breath of the old war still hot against their necks, with eyes and ears on the war that they all feel cannot be too far ahead. It's the kind of climate that makes men jumpy.

And yet Markov jokes, and Markov laughs, and Markov seems to be madly in love with a new woman every month. Gleb doesn’t need to wonder how he managed to annoy someone important enough to be banished to this grey and rainy island.

Markov has moved too fast tonight to be shouted at, but Gleb is already putting together a few choice phrases to greet him with tomorrow morning.

It’s not an unpleasant place, he must admit, if you like this sort of thing. The band is outfitted in flashy red jackets, with a full brass section, a pianist who enjoys winking at whatever couple dances closest to him, and a heavily-pomaded singer attempting a passable Bing Crosby impersonation. It's enough for this crowd, and most of the dainty cocktail tables surrounding the dance floor are empty. The dancers are without the rigid self-consciousness of nobility and without the pinched look of the poor, and unafraid of approaching a stranger to see how well they might fit together. The somewhat inexpert approximations of Cole Porter are enough to move to, and that’s all that this group could wish for at the end of a long working day.

There are a few who check over their shoulders to ensure they haven’t lost sight of the exit, or who can only relax at the little red-lit café tables which surround the dance floor once they have their backs to the wall. You don’t have to be a spy in order to feel that the horrors of war aren’t at all far behind you. You don’t even have to be Russian, and Gleb has learned that there are enough men in this city who will perhaps never be able to sit comfortably in a chair again, unless they can see every possible avenue of an attack.

Gleb is not one of these men. He will not allow himself cause to fear, and should disaster or danger arise, he’ll meet it calmly and ably. As he always has.

Some dangers sneak up on you more effectively than others, though. And he is less calm about the disaster of being stranded in a crowded dance hall, unsure where to look or what to do with his hands. He’s been favored with a few glances and some warm smiles from more than a few women and some of the men in the room, and he has had absolutely no idea what to do about any of it. So he’s been feigning blindness, easy enough to do in the dimly-lit club, and wraps his hands around his glass. It makes the vodka unpleasantly warm, but it gives him something to do.

But he doesn’t leave. He’s oddly reluctant to just  _go_ , now that he’s come this far. Markov hadn’t been wrong, he supposes. If you’re supposed to be watching a nation, you should probably spend time actually  _with_ them. Not just watching the motions of the powerful and wealthy, but what the common workers do. How they speak, how they enjoy a warm September night, how they dance. It’s its own kind of intelligence, in a way. He’s not shirking his duty by lingering.

It’s perhaps shirking his duty a little when his gaze turns inward, the familiar exasperation always there for him when he gets into a mood. He should not be afraid of what to do with his hands. He thinks he can be charming, he's aware of his own looks. He should be able to converse comfortably with anyone in this bar, with the confidence of a decorated Party man who knows the world and his place in it, his qualifications proudly displayed on his chest.

But he’s not in his uniform now, medals and indicators of rank replaced by a simple tweed and an unobtrusive pocket square. He can dress himself, he's not  _hopeless_ when it comes to fashion, but doesn't feel particularly freed by all his current options. He misses the certainty of his uniform, of putting on the same exterior every morning, leaving his rooms in Leningrad knowing what kind of man he is, knowing that others could see it too. In the past it has helped him go through the motions, at least, feeling as natural as a second skin, but he hasn’t been able to wear it since his arrival here. He could say that it’s that alone which has set him so adrift. It's almost close to the truth, too.

But even so, he's smiled his way through discomfort before. Uniform or not, why not get up and dance? Why not exchange smiles with a pretty English girl, pass the time with her, take his mind off of -- well, if not all his troubles, Gleb would settle for the removal of at least a few ever-tender memories, sweet and insistent as a bruise.

As if that unfaded mark was somehow pressed, prodded by an unseen hand, Gleb looks up.

His gaze just flicks to the side, the way that it does when you are aware of being watched before consciously knowing it, before Gleb can make himself remember that he’s trying  _not_ to make eye contact with anyone tonight. But still, the contact is made: his eyes meet the stare of a young woman sitting three tables away, her back to the wall.

Gleb’s fingers spasm around his glass, sending it out of his hand and into lazy swiveling spirals across the table. Vodka laps over the edge, spattering the tabletop, but the glass doesn’t topple entirely and shudders to a halt just before it reaches the table’s edge. Gleb leaves it there, unimportant and immediately forgotten.

Her Royal Highness has odd and unexpected tastes in nightclubs.

It’s her. Gleb doesn’t waste time doubting it. He’s spent five years catching glimpses of her in the upturned angle of a chin, blue eyes laughing or flashing in anger, a flick of auburn hair sent over a shoulder, a hand brushing against his in a crowded tram. Each time, every time, the illusion lasts only for an instant, and the woman before him is a stranger again. Every time, he feels the lack of Anya, of Anastasia, as an absence felt against the inside of his ribs. As fresh as though it was new.

He can do nothing to make it fade. The best he can do is ignore it, and pretend that that is the same. 

But this woman is not Anya as he remembers her. This isn’t a trick of the light, or a weakness of his mind, or his discomfort and yearning made manifest. She looks nothing like the grand duchess he fled from, the fairy tale that he buried. And that is how he knows she is real.

He isn’t sure how he wears the five years that have passed since last he’s seen her, but she wears them gloriously. She’s put on some weight, no longer the shivering street-sweeper living on a diet of tea and thin borscht. Her heart-shaped face with the sharp chin and pert little nose seems fuller, her eyes brighter, color in her cheeks and lips. It could be the dimmed lighting of the dance hall, the red and orange paper shades on the small tabletop candles dotted around her, but Gleb thinks the glow must be all her own.

When he has imagined her, he sees her in that ragged coat she wore when they first met. When he really wishes to torment himself, he sees her draped in ropes of gems, shining blue, deep crimson red and gold, her shoulders bare and her hands gloved against his. Here, now, she wears a simple red blouse with a sweetly scalloped collar, her hair not up in braids or piled atop her head but clipped simply away from her face. Both hands, ungloved, rest on the table in front of her. Pressed flat, as though she’s attempting to stop that tremble in her arms.

Gleb doesn’t get up. He wants to. Of course he wants to. Five years, and there she is, but he stays where he is. If he stands, he strongly suspects that she’ll bolt or simply vanish, a mirage rippling out of sight. He’ll either frighten her off or end what could be the strangest and most beautiful dream he’s ever had.

So he just looks at her, for as long as this miracle might last. It’s no great hardship, to simply sit and study her. He’s done it before, from the darkness of a box in a grand theater. Frustrated, determined, but temporarily unable to act, and confused by his own relief at the wait, at being unable to do anything but sit and watch. He had been carrying a gun on his hip for years, but it felt heavy and unnatural in his suit jacket that night, unbalancing him. Shifting his center of gravity just enough for a deceitful girl to give him the smallest shove, and send him spinning away from every certainty he’d comfortably lived in for his whole life.

He suddenly feels the remembered weight of that gun in his hand. The gentle resistance when the barrel had met the center of her forehead, pressed under that blinding array of diamonds and between two perfect eyebrows. And he remembers the absence of any resistance at all, when he’d pulled the pistol away, and held it against his own temple.

The light shimmers and swims before his eyes, and Gleb blinks. Doesn’t look away, doesn’t break her gaze, but-- but it’s close.

And then, she gets up. She’s moving, not towards a door but towards  _him_ , weaving around the tables and soon, too soon, she is standing before him.

He’s seized by the unnatural urge to respectfully get to his feet. If it’s because she’s Anastasia, then it’s a shameful impulse. If it’s because she’s Anya, then… then he’s not sure how he feels about it.

Instead, he extends a hand to the seat vacated by Markov. He manages a smile, and might even lift an eyebrow in some sort of challenge. Distantly, he’s quite proud of himself.

“You’re not here for me, are you?” She says, still standing over him, though she’s small enough that it’s not hard to meet her eyes. Her voice is as musical as he remembers it, clear and certain, cutting through the tinkling piano around them.

He feels compelled to comfort her, to reassure her, so it’s something of a surprise when instead he says “I could be,” and sounds petulant about it.

“No,” Anya says decisively, though there is still some wariness in her eyes. “You’re not here looking for anyone at all, and certainly not for me.”

She takes the seat. Gleb wishes he could offer her a drink, give her his somewhat disgusting warm vodka, but he has nothing to offer and nothing to say, and is instead focusing again on what to do with his hands. He finds they’re pressed flat against the tabletop, just as hers were a moment ago.

“I nearly ran out of here when I saw you,” she goes on. “I was so -- I wasn’t expecting to see you here. Or anywhere at all, really. But you looked at your drink, and you looked at the dancers, and you tried very hard  _not_ to look at anyone else,” her mouth lifts into a slight smile, and Gleb feels the room tilt.

“And then you saw me too, and. Well. You were shocked. It was all over your face. For a man in your line of work, you don’t hide much, do you?”

 _Not from you_ , Gleb thinks. And the room rights itself again. “No,” he says, acutely aware of his tongue twisting in his mouth. “I’m not much good at being anyone other than myself.”

She narrows her eyes at him. A show of temper, one she was too afraid to make in front of him in the past. “If I was a sensitive girl, I’d think you were being rude,  _comrade_.”

“Perhaps I am, a little,” he says. “And please --,”  _please_  “-- call me Gleb. I think we’d both be more comfortable if we left ‘comrade’ out of it.”

She settles back in her seat, observing him. “I think you’d be right. And I suppose you’d be more comfortable calling me ‘Anya’?”

Every other time they’ve spoken, the precious few times, he has been the one testing her. Now she’s already set him on his heels, has him weighing every word before it leaves his mouth. He feels as though he's in  _her_ office now, the little café table her own intimidating desk overlooking a fine view of the Neva.

“Yes,” he says, finally. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I mostly go by ‘Anna’ now,” she says. Which isn’t an answer, but the interrogator isn't obligated to answer questions of her interrogatee. So, again, he allows her to slip by him.

Besides, Gleb’s been distracted by a thought: in giving up her table and sitting at his, closer to the dance floor and closer to the bustling bar, she no longer has her back to the wall. And does not seem concerned by it. She is, perhaps, more concerned with the man sitting in front of her. Or, she's trusting Gleb to watch her back.

He knows how strong and capable she is, has long since realized she’s not just a girl who needs protection from the wild world. Has realized, to his own embarrassment, that the “child” he'd been so set on rescuing from her own mistakes is in fact a few years older than he is, and more than capable of taking care of herself. But a pleased warmth flares in his chest, just the same.

Close to her now, close enough to easily reach out and touch, he can correct some of his first shocked impressions: he can see that her simple red blouse has the sheen of a finer fabric than most in this room can afford. A dark skirt is belted at her waist and falls below her knees in a loose, comfortable style, which seems popular in the city this year. Her hair is much shorter than it was five years ago, not spilling down her back but just brushing her shoulders, curled artfully at the ends. She's wearing a touch of makeup too, a blush of dusty pink on her lips, a hint of shadow on her eyelids.

He wonders when she started wearing it. How she picked a shade, where she stands in the morning to apply it, what she thought as she re-applied the color to her lips before stepping into this club, or pressed some powder to her forehead in the bathroom before taking her seat at the table.

What she might have thought, darkening her eyebrows and frowning in concentration as she fumbled with small tubs of color and stain, if she knew she would be seeing him tonight.

But she didn't. She wasn't.  _Greedy,_  he chides himself, guilty of that capital Bolshevik sin. Greedy, and teetering into the realm of the truly fantastic. He tries to stay away from that, lately. Not just in regards to Anya, but in regards to everything. Better to stay rooted in reality, to recognize the truth for what it is. He's susceptible enough to being swept along by romantic ideas. The roots of that weakness are buried too deeply in him to sever entirely, but he can check their further growth at least.

“So,” he asks, directing his gaze out at the dance floor, attempting to re-orient himself. “Where is your anarchist?”

He doesn’t know  _why_  in particular he brings up the criminal, since he tries to think of him as little as possible. Not just because he is a convenient person to blame for the French escapade. But Gleb opened his mouth, and as so often happens to him, is unpleasantly surprised by what has sprung out of it. Perhaps it’s the thought of makeup, and who she most likely  _does_ think of as she applies it, that makes him ask.

“Who, Dimitri?” Anya seems as surprised as Gleb is, though not as unpleasantly. “He’s not an anarchist. ”

Gleb is confused for a moment, before it comes back to him that according to the information he’d been given, the criminal’s  _father_  was the anarchist. Gleb very much does not want to bring up fathers at all. He's spoken on that subject with Anya more than almost any other, and he would be quite happy to never discuss it with her ever again. It reminds him of who she is, it reminds him of who  _he_ is, and he's haunted enough by all they've already said about a father’s legacy.

“The criminal, then,” he smiles, an attempt to set them both back at their ease. “When you left Paris, I had heard you left it together.”

“You were still watching me?” She asks, a flash of real anger in her eyes and the proud lift of her chin.

“Not exactly,” he says, and then the full confession tumbles out. “There’s not much that the decadent nobles at the Neva Cafe like to do more than gossip. A few things were let slip here and there, and I could put together the rest.”

In fact Countess Lily, in her relief at the Dowager Empress’ dramatic change in mood, had developed a real chatty streak that her friend “the Count” only encouraged. As far as espionage went, it wasn't Gleb’s most challenging endeavor.

“So you weren’t watching me, you were just collecting information?” She sets her chin in her palm, and Gleb leans in closer, involuntarily. “Please explain the distinction to me, comrade Gleb.”

“You can’t watch someone you can’t see,” he says easily, not pulling away immediately again, though the  _comrade_  does hit in just the way he expects that she meant it to. “However much you might wish to. And I lost sight of you soon enough.”

Gleb sits back, settles one hand on the tabletop and wills the twitching out of his fingertips.

“So, after Paris,” he says. “What then?”

He could be making small talk, for how lightly he asks the question that’s been turned over and over in his mind for years. He's fairly proud of himself.

Anysa seems to consider for a moment, possibly weighing up what is wise or unwise to tell him. Then she sighs, smiling at a memory that Gleb has no presence in.

“Whatever we liked,” she says simply. “We stepped onto trains without knowing where they went, we walked until we found somewhere we felt like stopping. We tried out romantic ideas like sleeping under the stars, and found that a bed of rocks and dew aren't so romantic once you’ve gotten spoiled by a proper mattress and hot water in the morning.”

Anya shrugs. “I’ve done all of that before, I suppose. Traveling, wandering. But it makes a difference when you’re not doing it out of, I don’t know, desperation. Or because you  _need_ to get somewhere else. Or maybe it’s just that I knew that I was leaving a real home, this time. One I could go back to, one I would never lose again.”

“Paris?” Gleb asks, and perhaps he can’t help how skeptical it sounds. He supposes he can see what the fuss is about in a general way but, well. That degree of decadence will never quite appeal. “You still think  _Paris_  is home?”

She frowns at him, jarred out of her quiet happiness at memories of poor sleep on wet grass. “That isn’t exactly what I meant, but why shouldn’t it be? Still think it’s ‘no place for a good and loyal Russian’ ? Still think I should go back there?”

He shudders a little. Both at the idea of her returning to Russia, and the still-remembered taste of those words in his own mouth. He wonders if he ever really could have made her come back with him. If they would have made it all the way to Leningrad, or if she would have broken him down before the Eiffel Tower had even faded from view behind them. At the time he had felt so certain that he could do it. He’s less certain now, if it would have turned out according to plan. And he's utterly certain that he would stand no chance at all if he attempted it today. Even if he wanted to, which he doesn't. It's not his mission anymore, and he'd do quite a lot to avoid being given that mission again.

Especially as the Russia he intended to return her to is not the one that would be waiting for her today. A truth he is ashamed to even consider, but a truth nonetheless. Trotsky is gone for good, now. And Stalin’s arm grows stronger every day, as Gleb’s faith in a brighter future weakens.

“I doubt a train would take you there now, even if you wanted to go,” he says lightly, instead of answering her. “But London?”

There’s still that fire in her eyes, her mouth a little twist of temper. But she allows the subject to drop, and nods. “A train wouldn’t just happen to take us here either,” she acknowledges. “So we made a little extra effort, and didn’t leave our destination  _entirely_  to chance. It’s been a few months, since we arrived.”

A few months. She’s been in this city for  _months_. He’s struck by a belated sense of panic, at how easy it would be for her to have stepped down a different street or two, have made just one of a hundred turns differently, and he never would have seen her tonight. Or at all. It’s a fresh mark against this city, that in its bustling stubborn prosperity, it could have robbed him of this chance meeting altogether. In a city like London, they could have lived just three streets apart from each other for years, and still have never met.

But then, he has only a vague idea of how long she lived within reach of him in Leningrad. Or how long she swept a street he passed through every day, before a backfiring car pulled them together.

But he prefers to be annoyed at London than to think about that.

“And are you enjoying your trip to London, Miss?” he asks, tone solicitous as though they were fellow tourists meeting in the lobby of a fine hotel. “Visiting family, perhaps?”

Her jaw clenches around a forced smile, and she looks away from him, out to the dance floor. “I think not,” she says lightly. “They did not come when we invited them to visit in Russia, after all.”

 _Oh, well done_ , he thinks viciously to himself.

As much to distract himself from what the sort of “visit” she means would have meant for the revolution, he reaches for his forgotten glass of vodka, and offers it to her. That surprises a smile out of her, and she accepts it, takes a sip. Doesn’t cough at all as it goes down, either. But then, she spent more time out of the royal life than she’s spent in it; she should be no stranger to vodka. He doesn’t know if she would care for the observation, so he keeps it to himself.

“But I do like it here,” she says, setting the glass back on the table. “Dima can’t seem to stay away from the East End, because of course he always has to be where the action is. It almost reminds me of Russia, the struggle for the rights of the working class, the way people are shaping their own futures,” she shifts in her chair a little, glancing away. “When that feels a little  _too_  much like Russia, there's enough to explore to remind me that I'm very far from St Petersburg. Every street can feel like a new city, a new country, and I don't feel as though I'm carrying the weight of forgotten kingdoms around with me. I feel like I could explore this city for years, and still never really grasp it.”

She thinks, and frowns. “The ballet here is dreadful, though.”

He laughs. She blinks at the sound, but doesn’t seem startled or displeased by it. “Of course it is,” Gleb says. “Can you even call it ballet, this far from the Bolshoi?”

She laughs. “Spoken like a true patriot. If one who is also very far from the Bolshoi. Which-- I have to ask,” she leans in a little, tone dropping a bit, inviting a confession that he doesn’t need to be tricked into giving. “What  _are_ you doing here, Gleb? I always thought you’d stay put in Russia, once you returned.  Especially if,” she hesitates, looks a little self-conscious. “If you didn’t have much choice, and they’d packed you off to Sibera. When you left-- I wanted to believe otherwise, but I thought that they would kill you for sure.”

He lifts a shoulder in a shrug. Though he is touched, perhaps pathetically so, that she'd been thinking about him, even perhaps worrying about him. “I suppose the benefit to being an honest and dedicated member of the party from birth is that, having never lied, they don’t know how to spot the one time that you do.”

“So,” she takes another sip of the vodka, before offering it back to him again. “What happened to ‘I'll tell them I'm not my father’s son after all?’ Changed your mind?”

He studies her face, at this mention of his father. Finding only a careful blankness in her expression, he accepts the vodka and takes a drink. It's still terrible, though at least a little less warm.

“Well, I was trying to sound heroic when I said that, maybe to make a dramatic exit,” Gleb says ruefully, clearing his throat. “But on the way back to Leningrad, I thought perhaps my poetry wouldn’t be as appreciated by my superiors. There's no official policy on it, but I think that sort of poetic gallantry ranks along with fairy tales and long-lost princesses.”

“It  _did_  sound fairly heroic at the time,” she says, with a little laugh. “But you probably made the right choice. So not Siberia, but London. Is it a promotion, or is it exile?”

It’s not a demotion, certainly. And he hasn’t been banished from good grace entirely, as he would definitively know if that was the case. But there were very few, when he left, who could honestly congratulate him without a shadow of concern in their tone.

He considers her question, though. “I’m not entirely sure which it was. Maybe both. I  _am_  sure that I was sent here to be out of the way. But out of the way for my own good, or for the good of the party, I don't know. Protection by punishment does tend to be their style.”

It’s not a natural fit, that’s for sure. His English is passable, but there’s not much he can do about his accent, and it shows in the faces of whoever he talks to here. More than that, Gleb was never meant for foreign service. He doesn’t have the knack for languages or the right physicality to mask himself from notice. He’s better fit to speeches from platforms and presenting a good face for the uniform, a broad chest to rest those medals on, to show the strength of the Party. He’s suited for action, and he’s not bad with paperwork. What he does now is directly in between, and the worst of both: receiving the information from those who act, and passing it along to those who put it into paperwork.

“I’ve noticed you’re a little low on the ‘good of the people’ and ‘a new wind blowing,’ tonight,” she observes, setting her elbows on the table again in a distinctly un-regal way. “Just a coincidence?”

He takes another sip of the vodka. He has never said these things aloud. The first stirrings were there while he was still rising through the ranks in Leningrad, but it took his months in London to even begin to shape his thoughts around it: the truth of the new wind blowing through Russia, the wind that brought Stalin and his new kind of “good” for the people.

He is a spy, living and working with spies. He doesn’t speak the truth to anyone. But... he could speak the truth to her. She's hardly likely to report him. And there's not much he could say to make her opinion of him  _worse_ , given that he once came very close to shooting her between the eyes.

“Not a coincidence,” he says, when he puts the glass carefully down. “Perhaps the Kremlin noticed that too. My behavior grew… I suppose I had changed.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Gleb,” she says, with a wicked smile growing across her face. “But I don’t see how that could be a--”

He raises a hand. “Mercy, princess, please, on a poor man who’s been driven to drinking very poor vodka.”

She raises a hand as if to playfully shove his shoulder, then appears to think better of it. But she doesn't check the laugh which bubbles quickly out her, and she settles her hands between them again on the table. “What happened to being more comfortable with ‘Anya’?”

“What happened to being so interested in how I got to London?” he fires back.

Anya lifts both hands in surrender, a gesture that’s rather undone by how she is blatantly laughing at him.

He’s never heard her laugh so much before tonight, doesn't think he  _ever_ heard her laugh so freely. For that alone, everything that has led him to this table tonight is worth it. He might even spare Markov a lecture tomorrow.

And perhaps it's the soft thrum of the clarinet, or the motion around them as the dancers dip and swirl their way around the floor. But he can't help but notice this small dance of their own: Anya leaning closer into him and then shifting back again to her side of the table. Only to lean in again seconds later, the candlelight gleaming along her hair as it sweeps across her jaw.

“I was ashamed and angry, for what I had done in not following my orders,” Gleb says, entering into his part of the dance again and leaning into the table. “And at the same time, I was ashamed for who I had been before, such a dutiful and devoted soldier. Before then, I had never faced something that so completely pulled me in two different directions, so I had no sympathy, for those who struggled with the hard choices that they -- that we all needed to make.”

Gleb examines the cuffs of his shirt, the almost perfectly-circular spot of blue ink just over the curve of his wrist. Smeared just a little, where he had dragged his thumb over it this morning, involuntarily attempting to wipe it away before he could remember that the gesture would only make it worse. He thinks of falling silent here, but. He can speak the truth to her.

“When I returned, I had chosen love over duty once before,” he says, looking up from his sleeve. “And if that wasn't wrong -- and I didn't  _feel_ that it was, even if I was still ashamed -- if love wasn't wrong, then it must be that my duty was what was wrong. And it was hard to see things the same way, with my old confidence and faith in the revolution, after that.”

Anya isn’t laughing anymore. The band ends one song on a plaintive trill from the pianist, and the dancers pause to applaud before the next song begins. Anya pulls her own hands away and settles them in her lap, but Gleb notices that she doesn't sit back, doesn't lean away from him. It’s hard to tell in this light, but she could be blushing, a little. Or perhaps he just hopes that she  _might_  be, insane a hope as that is.

“You're not surprised,” he says conversationally.

“No,” Anya says quietly. “Surprised you’d… surprised you'd come out and just  _say_  it, maybe.”

He nods, though he’s not sure what he’s agreeing with. “But you knew.”

“You let me live, Gleb,” she says simply. “And it wasn't because of some newly-discovered White Russian sympathies.”

“Not quite,” he smiles, though his heart is thundering in his ears.

“I don’t think -- I didn’t know from the start,” she says, eyes on her hands. “That first time we met, I was just… I was scared. And you were kind, but you were also wearing that uniform. That was all I saw, then.”

He’s considered it, because of course he has. If they had met under different circumstances, if he had been dressed as any other man, if she hadn't just been startled by the sound, if they hadn’t been standing in the shadow of bleak government buildings. If, and if, and if.

“And after?”

“I don't know that I could ever  _not_  see the uniform,” she says slowly. “And it was… I was so  _afraid_. Not just when I saw you, not just when we spoke. But that whole time, meeting Vlad and Dimitri, meeting you, the trip to Paris, all of it. I was terrified. I don’t think I’d had one moment where I wasn’t, as long as I could remember. And then just when I thought all the fear was over, that I was safe at last, there you were again. You had always been kind before, but that time. You brought your gun with you.”

She falls silent, examining her hands. He examines her hands too, easier to watch the way she twists her fingers together than to look her in the eye.

“You weren’t dressed in your uniform then, but you might as well have been,” she says, voice low but firm. “You might as well have been in your father’s uniform, even if -- even if it was only briefly.”

“I'm not in my uniform now,” Gleb says, quietly. It’s nearly drowned out entirely, by the opening trill of a trumpet solo from the band.

She lifts her eyes to his again. And he could read the question in her eyes even if he wasn't watching her lips shape the words, seeing them more than he can hear them over the music.  

“Aren't you?”

It's not a taunt, and she doesn't say it to be cruel. The question is sincerely meant, her face open and her eyes searching his. He senses again that there is a particular answer that she wants him to give, but he isn't sure what the answer is. Would she rather he had left all that as far behind him as Leningrad, and is truly just the man she sees sitting before her? Or does she want him still to be a man kept at a distance, an avatar of a set of ideals rather than someone who  _could_  sit before her in a dance hall? Perhaps she does not want him to be a man who could take her hand, who could smile warmly and lean in and tell her that she’s never looked more beautiful than she looks tonight. Is she afraid of what that could mean? Or does she hope for it?

He wishes he could give her the answer she wants. He wishes he could give her any answer at all. But the truth is, he doesn't know himself.

Gleb glances at the dance floor, at the trumpet soloist taking a grinning step back after his moment, wiping his forehead with the back of one hand. Some polite applause, but the couples on the floor won't be distracted.

“Would you like to dance?” He says instead.

It's not exactly the answer she was looking for, and yet she still seems happy with it, letting out a short bright laugh of surprise.

“Gleb! You can dance?”

“I suppose you only have one way to find out,” Gleb says, pushing back his chair and rising, extending a hand to her.

She takes it. Smiling a little dazedly, as though she’s not quite sure  _why_  she does, but she takes it. And rises with him, letting him lead her to the floor.

They have touched before, but Gleb doesn't like to dwell on those moments. It's not that he doesn't-- it's not that he felt nothing, or wouldn't have liked to-- but. It was unearned contact. A finger underneath her chin, a rough hand grabbing her by the arm. They weren't -- he doesn't consider them as counting, somehow.

The time that did count, the touch that Gleb can feel against the back of his neck even now, was when she reached out for him. He can't imagine what made her do it, to touch the man who very nearly had almost just shot her, almost just shot  _himself,_ and every one of her finely-tuned survival instincts must've been screaming for her to run. But she hadn't. Instead, she'd reached for him. Her gloved hand a gentle pressure at the back of his neck, comfort, almost a caress.

It had brought him back to himself. Not to his Father’s son, to the strong arm of the party, but  _himself._ Uprooted, spinning out across black ice, her touch set the room right-side up again.

He had grasped her hand with his, as she pulled back. Unwilling to let the moment end, perhaps. Unwilling to lose that unfamiliar feeling of stability, of serenity, of  _rightness_  that her touch had brought him.

Or perhaps he had just reached for her hand because he had known it was goodbye. And he needed to show her, somehow, despite everything, how grateful he was.

But now, unexpectedly, her hand is in his again. He extended it, and she took it. Her other hand comes up to rest on his shoulder once they reach the floor. He hesitates, falters, then settles his own hand at her waist. The fine silk of her blouse is as warm as skin under his hand, and he has the horrible suspicion that he might just be blushing.

Fortunately, Anya isn't looking at his face, her eyes somewhere around his chest but attention truly turned inward, smiling as she listens to the warble of the singer, the rattle of drums that leads the steps.

That Gleb has any part at all in an expression of such simple pleasure stuns him to silence.

As they begin to move, Gleb leading unimaginatively but not too disgracefully, she follows with perfect grace, the gentlest weight on his arms and perfect lightness in her steps.  _She loves this,_ he thinks, and wonders how much of this grace was learned through dance masters and hours of practice, and how much just springs out of her, natural and irrepressible.

He imagines her in the woods, miles outside of Leningrad, snow in the branches above her and wind catching her hair, the hem of her rough brown coat, as she steps and circles, arms upraised, pressing footprints into the snow around her.

Another romantic, unrealistic fantasy. But he has Anya in his arms, spinning her on a dance floor bathed in low golden light, and she's smiling. This  _is_ a romantic and unrealistic fantasy. So perhaps he can indulge in his weakness for this kind of thing, just for tonight.

Two songs pass in silence, as Gleb recovers some of his own forgotten dance lessons enough to attempt a flashier step or two, each one rewarded by a brighter smile. Then the band strikes up a song that's meant more for a gentle sway than fancy footwork. That's when Anya finally speaks.  

“To answer your question,” she says, to Gleb’s confusion, lost in his thoughts and having forgotten entirely what his question could have been. “Dimitri is out playing cards tonight.”

“Oh,” Gleb says.  _Dimitri_. He supposes there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be on first-name terms with the man who took her out of Russia and back to the Romanovs.  _You have no right to be jealous,_ he thinks, and  _she calls you by your first name too,_ he thinks. He doesn’t know which thought is the one that calms him.

“He's found a club for rich young gentlemen and a suit good enough to get him into it, and  _several_  different ways of cheating that they don't know about yet.”

“Oh,” Gleb says again. He can picture it with depressingly perfect clarity. He isn't sure where his sympathies should lie: with the Russian citizen fleecing the spoiled heirs of London’s titled class, or with the poor fools who don’t know what kind of con man they’re up against.

It could be a funny thought, but Gleb doesn’t feel like laughing at it.

“You two should meet,” Anya says.

He looks down at her in surprise. “We have. I chased his crimes from one corner of Leningrad to another, not to mention the times I caught him spreading seditious rumors just outside my office building. My file on him was fairly detailed; I have childhood friends that I don’t know as intimately.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, unimpressed. “Oh yes. Because that counts as properly meeting someone.”

“Well, we never were formally introduced at court, your imperial high--”

Anya pointedly steps on his foot. She puts an impressive amount of force behind it, and it almost topples him over entirely. But it still surprises a laugh of out him, even if his toes are throbbing in their serviceable boots.

“That  _hurt_ ,” he says, though he can’t help smiling at her as he says it.

“My dancing’s even rustier than yours,” she says, all innocence. “What were you saying, Gleb?”

He draws her back into the dance, smiling apologetically at the nearby couples who’ve raised eyebrows at him over his outburst. “Something about one of the most regular troublemakers I ever came across in Leningrad. The one with the wicked grin, the gleam in his eye, face bright and intelligent under a hat that was just too fine for him to have paid for. The one who always managed to scuttle away from me, whenever I started to get a little too close.”

“That sounds like Dimitri, but it doesn’t sound like you,” she says evenly. “You caught me a whole world away from your office, in a guarded flat in the heart of watchful Russian expatriates. And you couldn’t catch one man, who you saw in the same place almost every day?”

He looks down at her, alarmed. She looks up at him, calm and unsmiling. But with a kind of understanding, or a question in her eyes.

She has him, of course. He knew what Dimitri was up to, or at least knew that he was up to nothing good, long before he knew his name. Gleb could have -- should have -- brought him in for some kind of discipline.

But even then, before he had been treated to an expanded sense of where the limit of duty was, he had tried to be fair. To look the other way sometimes, from the street rats and prostitutes, the ones who were just… trying their best, and doing no harm.

Dimitri wasn’t one of those, though. Making a living is one thing, making trouble is another. But Gleb’s attention was… caught by the man. Not with admiration, and certainly not with respect. But with a kind of involuntary  _awareness._ Always noticing him first in a crowd, Gleb’s eyes tracking the criminal’s movement even when his attention should have been elsewhere.

Now, he has a bit of a better idea as to what that was about, to notice another man in that way. At the time, he had banished thoughts of  _this_  close boyhood friend, or  _that_  man he had trained with, able to explain them all away as youthful foolishness, or admiration for a fellow soldier’s abilities. He had no way to explain away such focus on a  _criminal_. So he chose to keep his distance, and stay away. After all, Dimitri was shameless enough. Someone else would bring him in eventually. Then he wouldn’t be Gleb’s problem anymore.

Of course, just when Gleb had stopped seeing him in the square, he’d opened the file on his desk and seen that wicked smile again. And Dimitri had become Gleb’s problem after all, in a most spectacular way.

Anya is still waiting for an answer, and Gleb worries that perhaps his silence has told her more than he meant to. He can tell her almost any truth, but this… he finds that he’s afraid that she could think less of him for it, after all.

“I didn’t see the harm in him,” he says finally.

Anya snorts inelegantly, though she still looks at him thoughtfully. “Don’t let him hear you say that. His feelings will be hurt.”

He leads her into a turn, a little clumsily. He needs a moment to collect himself, a quick respite from those eyes, which threaten to unlock every one of his closest secrets.

Dimitri is the man who took Anya away from him, and the man that Anya chose to be with, and those are reasons enough for the rush of emotion that Gleb feels when he thinks of him. But there’s an embarrassment too, in remembering how he used to watch the con man so often, and in how little he understood himself, back then.

He can’t say that he wishes he had known earlier, that attraction is not always so simple as men  _or_ women. It’s knowledge that is dangerous even here and now, in the decadence and permissiveness of London. In Leningrad, it was safer to bury these things so deep that even he couldn’t see them. And he had enough to occupy himself with, and not much time for introspection.

That was before Paris. And before a car backfiring had brought him to Anya. After looking into that face for the first time there was no one, man or woman, who could catch him in the same way again.

Out of her spin and in his arms again, Anya has apparently decided not to be distracted from the subject.

“You should still meet,” she says. “I think he might like you.”

“Of course he would,” he says, exasperated. “I chased you across a continent and almost shot you in the head, and on top of  _that_ I'm in love with you. What wouldn't he like about that?”

She flushes a little, but there's that stubborn set of the chin again, lifting up to challenge him. “He knows you decided not to.”

So they’ve been talking about him. The idea of Anya and Dimitri discussing him, swapping stories about That Odd Soviet Gleb Vaganov is… extremely strange.

“So he knows I intended to in the first place,” he says dryly. “That's wonderful.”

“I mean it. I think you two could like each other very much.”

“We could like attempting to kill one another, perhaps.”

“Why, Gleb,” she asks innocently. “I thought that was how you do liking people.”

He considers stepping on  _her_ foot now. She reads it in his face, and laughs. Her hand shifts on his shoulder, heat pressed momentarily at the edge of his collarbone.

“So, why not bring him here tonight?” Gleb asks. “Is he an even worse dancer than I am?”

“No, but we often spend nights apart from each other,” she says with a small shrug. “I wanted to find a place with music, he was after his rich young men, so we made our own plans. It’s not so strange, for us.”

It certainly sounds strange to Gleb, and he isn’t sure what to make of the idea. “It isn’t?” he manages to say.

Anya considers before she answers. “I've learned that you can love someone very much, and still need some time to yourself,” she says with a laugh he almost feels against his chest. “We've been through so much together, but we can't go through  _everything_ together, all the time. Besides, he really was set on his gentleman-cheating. And I'm terrible at cards.”

“No poker face?” he manages to say.

“You're one to talk,” she quirks a quick grin at him.

He won’t be drawn in this time, though he can see now that she means to deflect away from the subject. So he says nothing, and Anya sighs, shifting her gaze to the band, looking at them without truly seeing them, thinking over her next words.

“We both aren't used to...having someone,” she finally says. “We’ve lived so independently, had to be completely self-reliant for most of our lives. And it's not so easy to turn off that sort of habit. We've always had to be on our own, to rely on ourselves and nothing else, and loving each other doesn't change that.”

“That sounds difficult,” he says quietly. He can see it, in a way. Living through such extreme times, such dangers and such fear -- it makes it hard, to set all that aside and just live and love as other people do. As you are told that other people should.

“Sometimes,” Anya says. “But I think these things always are. We've found ways to make it work.”

It hurts less than perhaps it should, to think of Anya with someone else. For all that he wanted to help her, protect her,  _save_ her. He still never felt that she was someone he could possess, someone he could be jealous over. How he feels about her fills him too completely, the bitter sweetness and the tender pain of it, coloring every day since he met her and since he realized how utterly he was lost, to allow for much else. In all that Gleb feels in not being with her, there’s just not enough room for additional pain or jealousy at who  _is_ with her.

He can’t say it doesn’t hurt entirely. But there is a reward to this too. To Anya sharing something so deeply personal with him. Honest with him as he has been with her, in a way that he has desperately craved.

“I can't say I know what that feels like,” he admits. “I have… always relied on things outside of myself. My family, the party, my ideals and my duty. The uniform,” he acknowledges with a tight smile.

He clears his throat, and wishes for a sip of that terrible vodka again. “It's independence, being alone without those things, that I struggle with.”

“Perhaps it’s just balance we all need,” she says absently, as though not addressing him at all. “Those without roots, having someone to ground them. And for someone rooted so deeply, to have those who can lift him free.”

He's not sure what's she's suggesting, if she's suggesting anything. But his breath catches, and his pulse drums against his collar. The tempo of the song slows for a moment, the singer’s voice falling out, allowing for a solitary low wail of the saxophone, vibrating in his bones.

But if she's saying what he thinks she might be--

“It certainly sounds unconventional,” he manages to say. The singer leans into his microphone again, but Gleb still feels that low note deep in his chest.

Her hand tightens in his for a moment. “I don't think you're so conventional yourself, Gleb. Aren't you a revolutionary, after all?”

He almost smiles. “Once upon a time,” he says. “But I’m not so sure, anymore.”

“Sounds like the start to a promising fairy tale,” Anya says archly. “Though I know you don’t approve of those either.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure,” he says, finding a playful tone again. “I’ve spent so much time around the things, I think I might have acquired a bit of a taste for them.”

“Watch out,” she says with an answering smile. “I hear fairy tales can get a man into trouble.”

Gleb rolls his eyes, and groans. “Trust me, Anya. I  _know_.”

She smiles, but it doesn’t get the laugh out of her that he was hoping for. She’s already thinking of something, something more serious, and he’s already nodding  _yes_ before she finishes asking:

“Can I ask you something, Gleb?”

“I think that would be fair,” Gleb says. Deciding  _not_ to point out that he’s been peppered with questions all night, since he does actually want to know what has her so thoughtful. And since he also doesn’t want to have his toes stomped on again.

“There's one thing I've never understood,” she says. “We'd only spoken twice, before you… before we met in Paris. And I could see then that you had changed, that you felt -- it wasn't just that you thought I was beautiful, or intriguing. It was more than that.”

“Yes,” is all Gleb can say.

“How?” She asks, frankly. “How is that even possible?”

Gleb takes a deep breath. Feels the spread of his own shoulder blades as he does, the circle made by his shirt tightening at his back, down to his elbows, across his arms and into hers.

“I can't explain it. I don't understand it myself. It had happened before I even knew I was in danger of it. Thinking you were beautiful, to finding you intriguing, to-- loving you.”

With every word, he expects her to break away from him. He can’t stop the confession once it’s started, but each word carries with it a sinking certainty that this is it, he’s finally going too far and saying too much. But she doesn’t back away, she continues to follow his vague lead through a song that is at least a few beats too fast for the pace they've settled into. Glaring a hole in his chest, almost. But not pulling away.

“But you don't even  _know_  me,” she says. Low and tense, almost angry. “A file is not knowing me. Whatever history they’re teaching now isn't knowing me.”

“I don't know you,” Gleb says. It’s an easy admission, something that he ceased to puzzle over a long time ago. “Every time I thought that I did, you'd only prove to me that I had underestimated you again. That there was more to you, always, than what I had thought. I wished, I always thought that if we…”

“Yes?” She hasn’t lifted her eyes to him yet, though her hand is tight around his. He can feel the barest shadow of a tremor in that arm, an echo of the frightened shiver from years ago. Or perhaps it’s just the deep rumble of the percussion, humming through them both.

Gleb speaks quietly, directly to the crown of her head. “If we had had more time. I would have liked to get to know you better. To just be able to talk to you, properly.”

It’s not his only regret, but it is one of the ones he feels deepest. That they never had been able to stop and sit in that tea shop. Spend time together as people, just strangers enjoying a chance meeting, a chance to find something bright and new together, in a world that felt so old and tired. To truly see each other, before she became a mission to him and he became a demon to her.

Anya looks up at him. So ferocious. So ready to run, ready to fight. But also ready to turn on a knife’s edge, smile, laugh, let him in again. She’s balanced between the two now, caught somewhere between challenging him and something much more fragile.

“Not afraid that you might not like who I'd turn out to be?” She says, tension in her voice. “Not afraid to find out, after all this time, that you'd fallen in love with someone who didn't exist?”

Gleb is the one who almost steps back from her, taken aback by the idea. “No,” he says. “I fell in love with someone I didn't fully know. Not someone who didn't exist at all.”

She’s still frowning, a faint line set between her eyebrows. “It's not the same thing?”

“Of course not,” he’s still a little thrown, so it comes out rougher than he meant it to. A little more rushed. “But, like I said. I don't understand it much. That's why I-- why I kept it to myself.”

“That you were in love with me?”

He’s the one who might bolt now. He never would have guessed that he’d be so thrown, so in need of air and space. The other couples circle around them at their own dreamy pace, the murmur of conversation and the click of the women’s heels abruptly digging into his awareness, almost painfully.

“Yes,” he says. He doesn’t run. He hopes that his palms haven’t begun to sweat, that he won’t pull his hand away and leave an embarrassing print of his hand on her fine silk blouse.

“You left without telling me that you were,” she agrees. The line unknits from between her eyebrows, and her tone has softened. This side of the knife’s edge, then, for now.  “And I suppose if I hadn't come over to your table tonight, if I had just left, you wouldn't have come after me?”

He attempts a smile. “A generous assumption, that I wasn't too shocked in the moment to even remember how legs are supposed to work.”

Her Majesty is unmoved, and unimpressed with his attempt at humor.

“Answer the question, Gleb.”

“Alright, fine,” Gleb says. Takes a moment to obediently reflect on when he had looked up and met her eyes, anywhere from half an hour to an eon ago. “No. I don't think I would have. It’s my own affair.”

“So it's none of my business?” And there it is again, the stubborn set of her jaw, eyebrows up in disbelief. He has seen some of that look before, but did not recognize it in the quiet street sweeper he questioned in his office, took it for meek deference. He knows better now, or she’s not afraid enough to attempt to hide it. Both, probably.

“No,” he’s truly baffled now. In imagining a confrontation like this, he had never thought she would react this way, as though he’s _offended_  her by keeping his feelings for her to himself. “It just isn't a problem you should have to deal with.”

“That's what it is to you? A problem, to love me?”

Gleb slips, in a quick and easy breath, from baffled to angry. It isn’t  _fair_ , to be interrogated like this. To be pinned against this wall, unsure of what he’s being accused of. He can bear a lot, he can bear almost anything from her, but this could be too much. To be obliged to fan out every one of his agonies and doubts and regrets at her feet, so that she can step on them if she likes, and laugh at him.

Because that’s what she must be doing. She can't possibly be truly  _angry_  at him for this. She must just be toying with him. And Gleb no longer enjoys being moved as a pawn for others.

“Well, I don't know what you would call it, but it's not exactly the easiest thing, to be constantly haunted by the memory of you,” he says, voice clear and sharp as ice. “To always wish I could see you again, and know that it's impossible. To set myself back along every step I’ve taken that led me here, led me to you, led me to  _lose_ you, and not see any way that I could have made it end differently. It certainly  _feels_ like a problem, for fate to tie us so closely together, and for it to also lock us in place so tightly that I couldn't come closer, could only  _ever_  lose you.”

He forces himself to take a breath, aware that his voice is dangerously close to rising above the acceptable murmur of the dance floor. She hasn’t looked away from him, her clear blue eyes wide but fixed on his.

“You asked the question, and I answered it,” he says, and is ashamed that his voice nearly cracks with emotion. “Why do you want to fight me about this, anyway?”

He has no right to beg for her kindness, though he's coming close to it. She has the right to be cruel. But he hadn’t expected that from her, either.

“I don't know,” she says, a note of petulance in her voice, but not towards him. She sounds almost frustrated, pushing for an answer with all the stubbornness of a girl trekking across the Russian wilderness, determined to walk her way to Paris if it will answer her questions.

She blinks, shakes her head slightly. A lock of hair slips free from the small clasp pinning it back above her ear, drifting down to brush against her jaw.

“I just feel that I  _do_ want to fight you about it. Or just to fight you about  _anything_ ,” she looks up at him again. Not angry now, but no less emphatic. “You're still a mystery to me too, you know. And you always were. Just when I thought I could guess what you were doing or thinking, you would change on me again. Call me in for questioning, then let me go. Let me go, and then follow me to Paris. Make a joke, show me kindness, show mercy. And then appear, my appointed firing squad. Only to surprise me all over again.”

“I wanted to avoid you,” she says, with an earnest frankness that makes him wince, but she goes on. “I wanted to avoid you, because I wanted to know you better too. I was afraid of you. And I wanted to learn all about you, because if I did, maybe I could find out what it was that kept me from hating you. And that frightened me too. Because I could have. I  _should_ have. But I didn’t. And I was afraid to learn why.”

Gleb swallows hard. Comes dangerously close to stumbling over his own feet, not that they’re doing much more than swaying in place now. The ghosts of his notice for Dimitri, the attraction and the fear and the confusion, hover behind what she says. He could connect the logic, leap to a conclusion that she could be inviting him to reach, but--

He was wholly unprepared for any kind of hope. For any idea that this chance meeting could end in anything but a chance just to speak, to explain. A chance for an ending, a proper closing of the door. He was in no way prepared for the chance that there could be the revelation of a new door entirely.

“I never thought--” he pauses, attempts to think clearly. “I never thought that it could be something you might want, as well. To know me.”

She blinks rapidly, raises her hand from his shoulder to push back the errant lock of hair. He misses the warmth of her hand immediately, the absence of the slight pressure enough to make him feel off-balance.

“I would still have liked to fight with you most of all,” she says airily, attempting the kind of imperious authority she must’ve learned in the cradle. It’s a little wobbly, but she manages it with a smile. “That's how  _I_  do liking someone.”

 _Liking_  someone.

Tonight he has spoken to Anya. He has shared a glass of horrible vodka with her, has talked frankly with her in all the ways that he always hoped he could. Has taken her by the hand and danced with her, felt the curve of her waist against his fingers, and the warmth of her breath against his neck. Has told her that he loves her even though he doesn't understand how it could be so, and she has said that she could never hate him, even though she doesn't understand how  _that_  could be so either.

He began this night uncomfortable, annoyed, and embarrassed at his own ineptness with things that should be easy for him. And now, the wishes and pains and hopes that he has carried with him for  _five years_ are being pulled out of him in a great flood, opened up to the smooth glow of candlelight and the soft touch of the trumpet, to Anya’s clear and honest eyes.

It is more, more redemption, more hope, more understanding, more healing, than he thought he could ever find. In a lifetime, let alone in one night.

It's a healing that he may never recover from, but it feels like a healing even so.

Overwhelmed now, he finds he can't think of a thing to say.

“A truce, comrade,” Anya finally says, drawing away from him a little, enough to look up into his eyes. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you. I can't promise to  _never_ fight with you again, but at least about this, right now, I'll withdraw.”

“Very well, comrade,” he says, unable to hold back the smile. “A truce. About this, right now.”

Silence falls around them at the word. Gleb looks up sharply before he realizes that the motion on the dance floor has shifted. The other couples are heading back to tables or the bar, rejoining the groups they came with. The band’s singer is wiping his forehead and turning to murmur something to the pianist, the saxophone soloist has fallen back into his chair as though he’s been punched; the band is pausing to take an overdue break.

The night has gone on far later than Gleb had realized, and the tone of the crowd is shifting. It's late enough that the time has come for everyone here decide whether to end the night with a dance and a chat, or see what could happen beyond the turn of midnight. Most seem to be choosing the latter, and the club is turning noisier, more crowded, and Anya glances around her with the first sign of unease at her surroundings since she sat down next to him.

“I should go,” she says.

“There's a cafe around the corner,” Gleb says quickly, almost before she finishes speaking. “It stays open late. Perhaps we could sit, have something to eat, and--”

Anya steps back, eases her hand from his. He doesn’t resist the movement, finding it easier to make his hand go slack and boneless, and try not to think about reaching for her hand again.

“No,” she says. Kind, but firm.  “No, thank you.”

But then she hesitates. “Not tonight.”

“Oh?” Gleb’s heart stutters in his temples, and he feels brave enough to go on. “So, then… another night?”

“That depends,” she says with a smile, raising an eyebrow at him. “Are you here every day?”

He looks around and shudders theatrically. “God, no. But I -- I do take lunch around the corner from here, often. My office isn't far. Green awnings, something about a dog on the sign, and their meat isn't too terribly overdone.”

“Something dog, green awnings, around the corner,” Anya repeats. “Alright. I don't work so far from here either. Who knows. We did meet here tonight, we might meet again.”

“Who knows,” Gleb politely agrees, though he would give anything to know for sure, before he lets this night end. He already has more he wants to know, so much more. Where does she work? Doing what? Does she come to this place often? Why did she pick it tonight? Where else does she go, how long will she be in London, what does she want to do next, and --

But, he's been given so much tonight. He will begin with being grateful for it now, whatever disappointment might come later.

He offers her his elbow, and with a smile she accepts it, tucking her hand against his sleeve. Feeling more gallant than his current life of espionage and bureaucracy generally allows, he escorts her from the floor and around the tables and milling club-goers and to the door of the dance hall, not dropping his arm until they are standing on the pavement outside.

The September days have yet to turn crisp and cold, and the nights still have some summer warmth left. Even at this hour, when the spark of a night out has begun to bank and smolder, more of an ember to carefully take home. Handled with care, in case it’s snuffed out entirely, or is stoked back into a flame too powerful for the witching hour to handle.

Gleb turns to face her, and looks down into that beautiful face. That was where this all began, of course. A pretty face, a girl he hoped to speak to again, if he had the chance. Odd to think about that first moment, how things have changed so much and yet not much at all.

Anya appears to be studying him too. Not afraid, and not smiling. He wonders if she's decided yet whether or not she wants to see him again. If she is ready, after all the time Gleb spent chasing her, to chase him. Or if she is memorizing him too, perhaps also a little afraid that this is the last time.

“Goodnight, Gleb,” she says simply.

“Goodnight, Anya,” he says, voice low. “It's been-- I'm glad, to have seen you again.”

“I'm glad too,” her tone lightens, the small smile returning to her face. “To see that you're not in Siberia, at least. It was good to talk, properly. And I enjoyed seeing you out of uniform.”

He actually  _blushes_ , to his complete horror; he can feel his face heating from his collar to his hairline. But perhaps it's fortunate that she can only have a moment to see it, as she steps in close to his chest, stabilizes herself with a hand on his wrist as she leans up, and kisses him on the cheek.

She doesn’t linger, the warm press of her lips a there-and-gone pressure that sets him utterly alight. He wouldn’t change it, wouldn’t ask for a longer moment, wouldn’t wish for time to stop. He no longer wishes to hold Anya in place, to grip too hard on a moment which he believes can’t be surpassed. And besides, even as she rocks back down onto her heels, he can still feel her lips against his skin, still imagine that he’ll keep a smudge of her lipstick on him always, a soft echo of her perfume waiting there in the shoulder of his jacket, to be caught again whenever he turns his head.

Anya’s hand slides off his cuff and she steps back with a warm smile, eyebrows up provocatively, something bright and knowing in her eyes.

Gleb closes his own for a moment. He’s attempting to press the sight of her into the back of his eyelids, so that, if he never does see her again, he can at least return to this moment as needed for the rest of his life.

He opens his eyes. And sweeps her a slight bow that is doubtless not at all up to court standards. She doesn't comment, just raises her eyebrows again, and dips him a small but much less sloppy curtsey.

With that, nothing more to say, the evening’s end perhaps too delicate for them both tondare disturbing further, she turns, and walks away from him.

Gleb puts his hands in his jacket pocket, and watches as she steps quickly down the darkened street. He lets her go, does not follow behind her, and she doesn't look back to make sure that he isn’t.

 _Aren't you afraid,_ she'd asked,  _to find you're in love with someone who never existed?_

No, that isn’t what he’s afraid of. He's afraid that in knowing better the woman he fell in love with, loved beyond reason and well before he should have, he’ll find that she is only more incredible than he ever imagined. That her reserves of kindness, courage, intelligence, beauty, and complexity are far greater than he knew.

He's afraid that the more he knows her, the more he will love her. And that then it will be that much more devastating, a blow he really never will recover from, to lose her all over again. To be reminded, a bright line drawn straight through his heart, that he never had her at all. Fate, setting them together and holding them apart, again and again.

But he also knows that it's a fear, and a risk, that he will take on again and again. As often as he has unexpected chances to do so.

Because she might look for him again. Might consider, even for a moment, letting her into the life she shares with Dimitri. For the hope of that alone, he'll run the risk of any possible punishing disappointment. Despite the fate that has set them against each other, the destiny that seemed to open an impassible gulf between them from the moment Gleb’s father strapped his pistol to his hip and stepped out into the unseasonably cool July night in 1918, and shut the door of their home quietly behind him.

He’s not so sure about that great, destined gulf now. Fate has proven itself to be less predictable, more obscure, than he once thought it was. Perhaps it was a kind of destiny as well, that set them two café tables apart. though , Gleb thinks, he can’t give fate all the credit. It was Anya, after all, who crossed the space between them, and sat.

London in 1932 is bursting at the seams, a city that only grows more frenzied with life and activity as the nations around it fall into silence and deprivation. But for a rare moment, as Gleb turns and begins the walk back to his own modest flat, the city is quiet around him. Well, as quiet as a city like London can ever get: the night provides its own gentle murmurs and stirs, the clatter of blinds being drawn, the soft hush of a click of a door, quiet goodbyes.

Gleb provides his own contribution to the night noises: a quiet hum, picking up the chorus of one of the band’s final numbers, the refrain that had slowed the pace of the room, had brought Anya’s eyes up to look into his. He can’t remember the lyrics exactly -- music is hard, melody jumbling grammar and syntax and making understanding more slippery -- but he has the tune. He hopes he never forgets it.

He finds himself smiling, warm in the crisp evening breeze. He steps past closed shops and restaurants, homes resting in quiet darkness. Statues rise in indistinct salute, perhaps commemorating the past victories which were nearly as miraculous and world-shaping as the victory Gleb has achieved tonight.

Gleb finds beauty in all of it, tonight. The whole city, and everyone in it, from the sleeping to the drunk to the restless just waiting for dawn to come. Every brick, every cobblestone, every carefully-wrought iron fence and every building stretching up towards the sky where no building had dared to grow before. Even in his own dinged front door with the mostly-broken lock, the stairs that rattle every step up to his flat, the faded and curling floral wallpaper that he draws a palm across, the other hand freeing his necktie from his collar.

It’s not Russia, and it never could be. But perhaps, Gleb thinks as he stands at his own window, looking out down the empty sleeping street as though he’s never seen it all before, it could be something else, to him. Perhaps something that he’d given up searching for. Before tonight.

Gleb feels more awake than he has in years, despite the hour. He is sure that he’ll be lying awake all night, thinking about what she did, what she said, how she laughed. He’s had many sleepless nights in this city, but this one he is actually looking forward to. As he haphazardly prepares for bed, London’s night continues to unspool around him, and somewhere out in its evening serenade, he knows she is there.

It’s with that thought, and just moments after he rests his head on the pillow, Gleb slips directly into a quiet, happily dreamless sleep. 


End file.
